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May 2011

Surrender is when you hand over your own intelligence to a higher one

Megha Bajaj is above anything else, a seeker. These days she is trying to find herself through her online writing courses for adults and adolescents. You can email her at:megh83@hotmail.com

My mother is always at loggerheads with my driver. Although she adores the 69-year-old eccentric ‘Kaka’, she would jump off a cliff before admitting to any such sentiment. She feels he always drives on the right side of the road, she is bothered by his habit of honking for the wrong reasons and yes, not honking for the right ones! One day, I asked him, “Kaka, doesn’t mom’s constant comments about your driving bother you?” The little man chuckled and replied, “Bebiji, your mother is a very intelligent woman. However, she doesn’t know how to drive. In driving I am more intelligent than her. So, whatever she says, it makes no difference to me.” I laughed heartily at the content look on his face. And then, I slipped into contemplation mode.

So often we use our minds in areas where the best thing would be to surrender to a higher intelligence. I have come across unhappily married couples who are completely resistant to going to a marriage counsellor. Suggest help to them, and most would reply, “We can take care of it ourselves.” The truth, however, is they can’t. The husband may be a successful CEO, the woman may be a magician in the kitchen, but in the case of marriage they both do need to go to a higher intelligence.

In mechanics, the simple man in the blue overalls down the street is a higher intelligence than most of us. In medicine, the man in the white coat knows much more than even the best-read intelligentsia. In every area of life, there is a higher intelligence available to us… the question is, do we use it?

Smiling, I realised I didn’t need to look beyond myself as an example of someone who resists higher intelligence. Whether it is trying to become my own yoga instructor, or a self-appointed chartered accountant – it is only when I approached a higher intelligence that things moved the way I wanted them to.

I had often wondered what ‘surrender’ meant and today, I finally know. Surrender is when you hand over your own intelligence to a higher one. Sitting in the air-craft, I surrender myself to the pilot. In a restaurant, to the chef and waiters. In the hospital, to the doctors. In the spiritual realm, to a guru. And in life, to God.

Startled, I realised all the best decisions of my life had been taken in my absence. They hadn’t come from my intelligence at all. It was almost like He had been holding me in the palms of his hand, making things happen. My intelligence had been important in learning certain skills or accumulating knowledge, but that was it. It was my spiritual practices – meditation, chanting, introspecting that had brought me to this happy, peaceful plane of life. Every prayer, no matter what it was that I had been asking for, was basically a plea for Him to take over. Today, finally, I understand the wisdom in these words: Men of intelligence have all the questions, men of surrender have all the answers… I pray that I grow in surrender, each day, in every way.